This dream is not over

Bernard Perusse, Montreal Gazette04.01.2009

Yoko Ono answers questions during morning press conference in Montreal on Tuesday March 31, 2009. Ono was on hand for the launch of her new exhibit called "Imagine" at the Museum of Fine Arts.Pierre Obendrauf
/ The Gazette

Yoko Ono signs card following morning press conference in Montreal on Tuesday March 31, 2009. Ono was on hand for the launch of her new exhibit called "Imagine" at the Museum of Fine Arts.Pierre Obendrauf
/ The Gazette

Yoko Ono leaves morning press conference in Montreal on Tuesday March 31, 2009. Ono was on hand for the launch of her new exhibit called "Imagine" at the Museum of Fine Arts. (THE GAZETTE/ Pierre Obendrauf)Pierre Obendrauf
/ The Gazette

Artist Yoko Ono poses at Daylight Studios in New York City. Her upcoming exhibition opens April 2 in Montreal.Steve Simon
/ The Gazette

John Lennon didn’t have five shillings to hammer a nail into a white board at Yoko Ono’s Indica Gallery Exhibit in London in 1966, so he asked if the artist if he could hammer an imaginary nail for an imaginary five shillings. By most accounts, that moment was the genesis of one of rock n’ roll’s most notorious relationships, both vilified and celebrated.

More than four decades after that milestone encounter, visitors to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts will be able to pick up a hammer and do what the late Beatle could not. The interactive Painting to Hammer a Nail is one of 140 pieces of memorabilia on display at Imagine: The Peace Ballad of John & Yoko, the Ono-endorsed exhibition that opens at the museum Thursday.

Admission to the exhibition, which is exclusive to Montreal, will be free. “It’s a revolutionary way of doing stuff, but it goes with the idea that peace is for everybody and it isn’t something that you have to sell,” Ono, 76, said during a press conference at the museum yesterday. “We share peace between us – together. I think that this is the start of a beautiful age.”

Sharing and interactivity play a role the Imagine exhibition, which allows visitors to stamp “Imagine Peace” on world maps, play a version of the Lennon classic Imagine on a replica of his iconic white piano, assisted by Disklavier software, or write a wish and hang it on a wish tree.

Among a handful of more recent Ono works, Play It By Trust consists of 15 chess boards set up for playing. The title comes from the perfectly Ono-esque decision to make all the pieces white. The new idea expands on her 1966 work White Chess Set, featuring only one board. A replica of the earlier exhibit is also on display with some 140 recordings, drawings, books, photos, films and other visuals documenting the couple’s artistic life, peace crusades and watershed career moments,

One of the exhibition’s main themes is the Lennon-Ono bed-in, which took place at Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel in May 1969. Their anthemic Give Peace a Chance, featuring celebrities and well-wishers on its chorus, was recorded in their room and became the first Plastic Ono Band single.

A section in the exhibition devoted to the couple’s lighthearted peace events features the song’s handwritten lyrics, the reel-to-reel tape on which it was recorded, Lennon’s Gibson guitar, adorned by drawings, and a replica of the bed from which they held court 40 years ago for both adoring and hostile members of the working press.

Ono’s memories are fixed on the support, not the mockery. “Montreal was a place where John and I created a very important statement,” she said. “We didn’t think that it was going to be that important at the time, but it (made) the beds for our lives.

Ono, noting that she and Lennon were still newlyweds when they embarked on the bed-in event, credited the city for inspiration. “When all the journalists went home around 6 o’clock, John and I would turn around and look at the sky. It was a beautiful view. I always remember that,” she said. “But also, without your vibrations, your spirit around, Give Peace a Chance may not have been born. It was a work between John and I and our partnership with Montreal.”

Other sections of the Imagine exhibition tackle themes like Lennon and Ono’s first meeting in 1966, avant-garde works like Film No. 5 (Smile) and Two Virgins, their War Is Over! If You Want It! campaign, and the Imagine and Some Time in New York City albums.

Fascinating pieces of pop history are everywhere, like Lennon’s acerbic response to Canon S.E. Verney, who refused to allow the leaflet for Lennon and Ono’s 1968 Acorn Event to be distributed in Coventry Cathedral. In every section of the exhibition, the sounds of music, conversation, interviews and avant-garde recordings by the couple provide a soundtrack.

Even the Société de Transport de Montréal is getting in on the act: starting Monday, until June 21, a message of peace from Ono will be broadcast throughout the metro system and displayed onscreen inside metro cars.

“I think of this world as people who want peace and people who want to solve problems by violence and war,” Ono said. “And I think, by now, 99 per cent of the world is very much for world peace, very much for solving things by discussion. There are so many of us, we’re going to win.”

(Imagine: The Peace Ballad of John & Yoko opens tomorrow and runs through June 21 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1380 Sherbrooke St. W. Admission is free.

Lectures and films about Lennon and Ono, , also free, will be offered while the exhibition runs. For the schedule and details, go to the museum’s Web site at mmfa.qc.ca

To read Yoko Ono’s tweets, including an abstract one from shortly after yesterday’s press conference, go to http://twitter.com/yokoono)

bperusse@thegazette.canwest.com

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